All in all, we have a pretty nice scrape under his nose, which looks like blood, but it’s just very red. We have a bruised under his left eye, and two scrapes – on his forehead and cheek.

And of course immediately after that I had to take one of the weens to the vet… So now that’s twice I’ve walked in there with two fresh battle injuries. I would prefer to say out of the public eye for a day or so after he has these booboos. So now they probably think I abuse him. I just told them that he’s learning how to walk.

When Logan had his first booboo, a Mom with a 12 month old asked me if he’s learning how to walk… I said yes, and she said, “Ah, yes, there will be many more of those!” LOL Glad someone understands!

Logan’s first booboo… I’ll try to get a picture of his most recent one tomorrow.

Oh… I think he might be getting a cold/cough… He woke up tonight (about an hour after he went to bed) with a small cough. Hope it’s nothing, because he has to don a Superman costume for Halloween this Saturday!

Jersey is hopefully pregnant. She spent a week at Vanita’s house with O’Malley and we had one confirmed breeding (probably more, we just didn’t see it). My Mom brought her to Blanco on Thursday, so that night I went and picked her up (missed her!) and dropped Logan off.

Friday morning I left for Denton. That was a long drive. I watched two movies and listened to 50% of a good audiobook I picked up a dog there. Her name is Georgia and she’s Jersey’s daughter. They are very similar in the face… but WOW Georgia is small! She’s 8.4 pounds while Jersey is 12.8 and just much chunkier. Georgia definitely has some growing to do. Jersey looked like that (though bigger) when she was her age, though. Kind of lanky and not really sure what to do with herself. But she has grown into a gorgeous dog So I’m sure Georgia will, too, though she’ll probably only be 10 pounds.

While I was gone Mom brought Logan to Marble Falls and she, Logan and Ryan had lunch. Then Ryan took Logan to the park and they had a lot of fun, of course

Then on Saturday Ryan’s parents came over! That was awesome. We watched the UT vs OU game and just hung out. My parents came over Saturday night for dinner (tortilla soup with cornbread, yum!). They stayed for a while. Mike and Dad talked politics the whole time and we sat outside (it was cold!) and talked on the deck. It was so nice and peaceful.

They just left about an hour ago. Miss them already. We watched the latest Harry Potter movie last night and some this morning. I made Belgian Waffles which were delicious (made them from scratch – never done that before!). Logan had a bottle, a banana, and a waffle. Now he’s napping, so is Ryan… and it’s a beautiful day!

We’re going to do some work around the yard. We have some junk in the back yard on the side of the house that Ryan’s going to help me drag out to the brush pile. Then I’m going to mow back there. We’re also going to Backbone Nursery today. I’ll probably get some plants to plant by the dog house.

I’m so blessed — I feel it every day and I LOVE it!

Last night I was getting him ready for bed. Now, when I put him down, I can put him down and he’ll stand up. He’s very good at standing up by himself.

So I put him down to do something… and I start walking away… and he walks after me! He took about 5 steps. I was like, “WOW! I didn’t expect that!” So we do it again… and again… and again… All about 5 different times!

Today he walked about 4 feet – all the way to the side table by the couch.

And he’s been progressing and progressing He still won’t just get up and walk. He has to be provoked. But we’re getting there!

Here’s a video just before bed

But he says I’m very healthy, so… cool

This morning Ryan took Logan to the field, so I got to sleep in

We went to Round Rock Premium Outlets today. We went to look for shoes for Logan. So at a kids shoe store we bought him a pair of Side Stripes – size 4.5! They were on sale so they were $15

Also went to Carter’s and bought three sleepers and a little outfit – all was like 70% off.

And I bought two shirts and a pair of pants for myself

Then we went to Hobby Town where Ryan bought some stuff. I was in charge of Logan and we had strict instructions to leave Ryan alone. So Logan went and pulled a bunch of model airplane kits and such off the shelves. He also pitched a few fits because he had not had a proper nap at all that day. He slept on the way home. When we got home he got a bath, put his PJs on (a new cute baseball sleeper) and went to bed!

I still feel the headache… a weird sort of pressure or tension, but it’s nothing like it was, and it’s nothing that requires constant Tylenol. I do plan on calling the doctor tomorrow, though.

And it’s not a migraine – I don’t have any sensitivity to light or noise.

I was screaming! Logan was screaming! And Lexi was running around the room like mad because we were so excited.

Of course, he’s crawling again… But he took another step by himself and I got it on camera, though you can barely see it.

We were planning on taking my Civic to get the two flat tires fixed. They will hold hair for about 30 minutes, so we were just going to drive it somewhere in town. But Ryan saw that one of the holes is on the side wall, which means they can’t fix it. So we have to take it to Discount Tire, where we have a warranty. And Ryan plans to give them a piece of his mind! They sold us crap tires which got holes in them every 10k miles or so. So finally they upgraded us to a mid grade tire. Well those tires don’t even have 5k miles on them and they get a hole in the side wall. So here we are again!

In other news, Ryan got called out. On Labor Day, too! He wonders if he gets double time plus the holiday pay, LOL Hope he does! So he won’t back until around 10pm

And here’s a video of our cutie, Logan, at 13 months. He’s learning where his head is and how to put things on it.

So, now Ryan’s outside replacing the discs on the two front tires and the brake pads. Would have cost us about $250 in a shop, but my wonderful hubby will do it for $150

Also, the Civic has two flat tires. It had one, and it just sat there cause we rarely drive it. Then it got another one… who knows how since it didn’t move, LOL But the tires will hold air for a couple of hours – enough to drive it to the tire place up the road. But first Ryan’s changing the oil. Like I said, we barely drive it… so the last time he changed the oil and filter was February 2008! But we’ve only gone 7k miles in that time and it has synthetic oil in it.

So, that’s our day If it doesn’t take too long we’re going to drive to Austin (after everything is fixed!) and go to JC Penny!

The Problem

Molly and I take a lot of pictures and video. Our current disk usage for video is 78GB and pictures is 160GB. That amounts to 34,000+ pictures, although many are duplicates shot in RAW+jpeg formats. Each full memory card from my camera dumps another 2GB onto the hard drive, which was beginning to run out of space. We had been shuffling files around between the two 320GB hard drives in our desktop in order to avoid the “low disk space” warnings and burning DVDs of the files we don’t access often. More importantly, these hard drives contain the only copies of these pictures and videos, which document the last six years of our lives together and countless memories. A destructive Windows virus or hard drive failure could potentially erase all of our media. We decided to add more storage space and proactively safeguard our pictures and videos. The best solution was decided to be building a home server with redundant hard drives.

The Solution

A home server is an always on, standalone computer that allows for centralized storage of files that can be access over a network (wired or wireless), as well as performing other duties. Our goals were to have lots of storage, easily upgraded and expanded, protected from viruses, and low energy use. After much research, we ended up building the following:

AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3 processor
ASRock M3A780GXH/128M motherboard
Crucial 2GB DDR3 RAM
Two 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green SATA-II hard drives for storage
100GB Western Digital IDE hard drive for operating system (pulled from our parts box of computer stuff)
Case, fans, cables, and other accessories

The server went together fairly quickly and I fortunately didn’t forget to order any critical pieces. The processor chosen is a low power model than only uses 45 watts. The Green series hard drives are also low energy devices. The complete up-and-running server only uses 82 watts in idle condition, which is pretty low. It’s just a little more than what a single 60 watt light bulb uses, so this shouldn’t affect our electric bill too much. Most amazing is that the heatsink on the processor is cool to the touch, without the slightest hint of warmth. The exhaust air leaving the case is also room temperature. The motherboard has six SATA-II ports, allowing us to connect an additional four hard drives someday.

The case has blue LED fans. A little bit of flair can be a good thing.

Close up of the internals.

Software

Ubuntu Linux (9.04 Jaunty Desktop Edition) was chosen for the operating system for several reasons. First, I have a personal preference for using Linux. Second, Linux is renown for stability in server applications (something like 80 to 90% of the internet [web servers] runs on Linux). Third, there has never been a single widespread virus for Linux. Fourth, Linux is easy to customize and modify. And fifth, Linux is open source and FREE!

Backup Policy

Only one of the terabyte hard drives is shared with Windows. The second terabyte drive is synched to the first every night. A program called rsync is scheduled by cron to run automatically. Rsync only transfers files which are new or have changed, so it doesn’t synch everything all the time. It is also set up to not delete files that were deleted from the original drive. So if the shared drive gets deleted by accident or virus, the backup drive will still retain the files. A RAID array was considered, but some vulnerabilities led me to choosing the backup method discussed.

I might use another hard drive to to make yet another backup. As mentioned, many of my pictures are duplicates. The RAW files average about 10MB and the jpeg files average about 2.5MB. I like keeping the RAW files because it contains the image information straight off the camera’s sensor without lossy compression, like jpeg does. However, in a something-better-than-nothing situation, I could just synch the jpeg files, only needing one fourth the storage size. This drive would then be disconnected from the server and stored in a fireproof safe at the other end of the house, which would protect and lightning strikes (should the surge protector on the server fail to operate fast enough), fire, and theft of the server. Synching would only be done every month or two since it would have to be done manually. Might be a little excessive, but I really don’t want to lose my lifetime of pictures.

Integration with the Network

Our Windows desktop computer was modified to have the “My Pictures” and “My Videos” folders seamlessly point to the server. So when you go to Start -> My Pictures, you are instantly taken to the server without noticing the difference. Our current network is a 100Mbit LAN, so data transfers are decently fast. Not as fast as transferring from one local drive to another, but fast enough to move around large files in a reasonable amount of time. Faster speeds could be achieved with a newer Gigabit ethernet card on the desktop computer and a Gigabit switch. The rest of the network and devices (server included) are Gigabit capable.

Access

The server is located in our office/guest bedroom closet. Since it doesn’t have a monitor attached, all access has to be done over the network. Only a USB keyboard is connected in order to log in to Linux. Once logged in, you can access the server’s command line through encrypted SSH terminal, or you can access the graphical interface over VNC. VNC is a remote desktop protocol that enables you to control one computer remotely from another. So from our desktop (or my laptop), I can remote desktop to the server and use it as if I were sitting in front of it with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It is pretty cool.

Networking

In order to get our desktop, server, PS3, and DVR connected to the network (Dish wants to charge $5 a month for NOT having your DVR connected to the internet!), we needed to run Cat-5e ethernet cable from the jacks, through the walls and attic, and back to our central networking station, the office closet. Only existing jacks were chosen to have ethernet added because this greatly simplified the installation. Our home builder graciously installed two coax and one phone line in every wall plate, so one coax cable was disconnected and used as a pull string to feed cable up through the walls and into the attic. Once done, the coax was pulled back down and reconnected. A while back I ran our surround sound through the walls and attic and did not have existing cables to pull on which was a real pain.

A standard six port wall plate was chosen that is capable of accepting various inserts for coax and ethernet jacks, and blank inserts covered up unused holes. Four runs of Cat-5e was made to the entertainment center for the PS3 and DVR, leaving two spares (a Wii for Logan someday? and who knows what else). Two runs were made to the desktop, leaving one spare for connecting a laptop to the wired network (faster than wireless) or a future network capable printer. One run was made to my hobby table, also for laptop use.

This is the wallplate for the entertainment center.

All the Cat-5e cables terminate in the closet where I also used wall plates as a kind of patch panel. One port was used for coax which I had to swap with our previous internet enabled outlet in the outside cable service box. The cable modem gets a signal from this jack and connects our wireless router to the internet. Each port on the router connects to an ethernet jack somewhere in the house. Since we only have a four port router, we can only have four devices on the network at a time. Including a (Gigabit) switch into the network someday would allow us to make use of the other jacks.

The patch panel.

Optimizing the Wireless Network

A wireless survery was conducted in order to find the optimal orientation for the wireless router. Since it doesn’t use external antennas, it’s not obvious how obtain optimal coverage in our house. The survey was conducted by running kismet on my laptop from the back of the living room, which is our most frequently used wireless area. Kismet is a wireless network analyzer program that reads received signal strength from an access point, and much more information. The router was orientated on each 3D plane and signal strength was measured. I found that any upright orientation provided noticeably better received power than when it was lying flat, which is probably how most people end up using it. It pays to be a nerd.

This particular orientation was chosen because it allows the wires to flow cleanly.

PS3 Media Server

The server also functions as a media server for the PS3. This allows access to our pictures and video to the PS3, which displays on the TV. So now we can watch all our home movies on the TV without having to burn DVDs, and sometimes it’s just more fun to flip through pictures on the big screen. I don’t know how accurate this is, but the media server software running on the server reported a peak transfer rate of 68Mbps, which is pretty darn fast.

Conclusion

We’ve had a lot of fun using the home server so far, and it’s given more things to learn about and tinker with Linux. It presents endless possibilities for other uses, like acting as a DVR for security cameras, hosting a live “Puppy Palace” webcam, home automation to control electrical outlets and appliances, and just about anything else. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. There will be a quiz next time I see you.

The complete setup.